At a Glance
- Tasks: Design AI systems for chip design, making autonomous decisions and optimising data strategies.
- Company: Early-stage startup backed by top EU investors, focused on innovative AI solutions.
- Benefits: Competitive salary up to £120k, equity package, and growth opportunities.
- Other info: Join a dynamic team and grow into a leadership role as the company scales.
- Why this job: Be a pioneer in AI chip design and shape the future of technology.
- Qualifications: Experience in building AI systems and strong problem-solving skills.
The predicted salary is between 100000 - 120000 £ per year.
Compensation: up to £120k base + founding equity package
About
Building a chip takes hundreds of engineers and years of work. Physical design — the placement, routing, and timing of transistors — is one of the hardest stages: thousands of interdependent decisions, sparse domain data, and no general-purpose AI that understands circuit structure. This role exists to change that.
This is an early-stage startup backed by top EU investors, building an AI reasoning system for physical chip design. The analogy is closer to OpenAI's math reasoning work: teaching a model to navigate symbolic, graph-structured problems from first principles.
You'd be the first AI hire, working directly alongside the co‑founding team and a founding chip design architect. You’d have the opportunity to grow into Head of AI as the company scales post‑seed.
What you’ll do
- Design and build AI reasoning systems that understand circuit structure and make design decisions autonomously
- Build post‑training pipelines — fine‑tuning, reward modelling, and feedback‑driven learning on proprietary chip design data
- Develop synthetic data generation strategies for a domain with limited open‑source examples
- Drive data strategy, model architecture, and inference optimisation across the full AI system
- Work directly with the founding chip design architect to understand problem structure and translate it into training signals
- Shape technical direction alongside the founders — framing problems, proposing approaches, designing experiments
What you’ll need
- Deep, hands‑on experience building AI systems for hard, novel problem domains — reasoning, mathematics, biology, physics, or similar
- Ability to build reasoning models from scratch: post‑training, fine‑tuning, data strategy — not just deploying existing pipelines
- Strong fundamentals across model architecture, training dynamics, and inference optimisation
- First‑principles mindset: given a new structured problem, you can understand it and build an AI system to solve it
- Startup mindset: comfortable with ambiguity, able to move fast without a large team behind you
Optional Bonus
- Experience with symbolic reasoning, graph-structured data, or formal methods
- Background in post‑training for reasoning or maths‑style models
- Synthetic data generation for low‑data domains
Shortlisted candidates will be contacted within 48 hours.
Founding Research Engineer employer: Axiōma Search
Axiōma Search is an exceptional employer that fosters a collaborative and innovative work culture, perfect for those passionate about advancing technology in defence and security. Employees benefit from a supportive environment that encourages professional growth through hands-on experience and close collaboration with experts in the field. Located in a vibrant area, Axiōma Search offers unique opportunities to contribute to mission-critical projects while enjoying a balanced work-life dynamic.
